The SONY MAVICA FD7 digital camera

The model described here is now thoroughly obsolete: modern Sony
digital cameras don't use floppy disks (which wouldn't hold even one
high-resolution picture). This rather renders this page throughly
obsolete as well, but as this was the model used (in 1998) to produce
the pictures on this site I have decided to leave it here if only for
historical interest.

Digital cameras have developed considerably since the earliest
ones, but all but the most expensive still have a some way to go
before they can match the quality of a conventional 35mm camera. 3
megapixel cameras can produce extremely good results up to a fairly
large print, but a good 35mm camera can using fine grain film can
fill a large projection screen with a very clear image. There are a
few cameras which produce profesional results, but at professional
prices. For amateurs, cameras around £800 can produce very
satisfactory results - and the latest top-of-the range inkjet
printers are so good that it is sometimes difficult to tell that the
results are not a conventional chemical photo print.

The Sony Mavica FD5 and FD7, which were available around 1998 but
are now out of production, had a nominal resolution of 640 by 480,
but to complicate matters Sony used a video CCD (charge coupled
device - the imaging screen) designed for video camcorders. The
resultant 625 line picture was converted to 640 by 480, producing a
result which was softer than a straightforward 640 by 480 CCD would
produce - the effect can be seen on the full-size picture extract on
the left.

To make matter worse, the 625 lines had an interlaced scan, just
like a camcorder - odd lines first, then even lines - producing two
interlaced 'fields' which together make the 'frame'. The result is
that fast moving objects appeared in different places in the two
fields, as with the car on the right; so to get round this the camera
offered a 'field' option, whereby only odd lines were scanned, and
then doubled - thus reducing the vertical resolution even further.
This rather placed it out of court for action photography, although
hand-held work was OK in 'frame' if you were careful.

The great advantage at the time lay in its unusual medium. Most
digital cameras of the period when the the Mavica FD series were
available used a serial lead to download pictures in memory to the
computer, so that you had to keep plugging and unplugging leads from
the computer (never a good idea): you were also limited to the number
of pictures the memory could hold, since it was only a couple of
years later that cameras with memory cards became common.

The Mavica, uniquely, used an ordinary floppy disk. This meant
that you could take a picture, transfer the disk to the computer, and
open the picture in a graphics program, all in a few seconds. Since
the disks cost next to nothing there was no limit on the number of
pictures you could take (compare the cost of SmartMedia and
CompactFlash cards). The FD7 version (there was a simpler FD5) also
had at the time by far the best handling of any digital camera under
£1,000: it had good autofocus and a 10 to 1 optical zoom.

In the absence of a scanner at the time, I found it extremely easy
to copy photographic prints, even quite small ones, and I even copied
a 35mm transparency simply by holding it in front of the lens and
holding the camera up to the sky - it focused perfectly well on the
transparency which was only about an inch away! The first picture in
the Stratford-on-Avon slide show - right - was done this way, as were
the two photos of the church and of the theatre foyer. (As they are
an animated GIF they are in only 256 colours, which produces the
dotted effect.) Two of the larger pictures in the Stratford
Pictures page were done this way, the rest coming from PhotoCD or
scanned from black-and-white prints.

So in 1998 on balance I chose the Mavica for its ease of use: the
quality was just about OK for web pages - most of the pictures in the
earlier pages on this site were copied from books or prints using the
Mavica, and then reduced in size considerably before converting to
72dpi at the new size: this minimized the effects of the odd scanning
process described above.

In case you would like to assess the quality of the camera's
results, I have provided a full-sized
unretouched picture on a separate page: image file size is 86k.
Note that modern cameras will produce much better results than
this.

The floppy disk Mavicas are now out of production. Cameras using
SmartMedia or Compact Flash cards - or Sony's proprietary memory
stick - can store the larger file sizes, and now that USB connections
are more or less standard, can download them in reasonable time to
the computer. All this consigns the old Mavicas to history, though
Sony continue to use the name for its range of high-quality digital
cameras.

For information and very detailed reviews of digital cameras there
is an excellent site at www.dpreview.com.